One of the most popular high end game engines is Epic's Unreal engine from the Unreal Tournament series of games (above). Virtual Heroes has extended the Unreal engine into the Unreal3 Advanced Learning Technology system. © Midway.

McGonigal believes ARGs can be employed both to teach people how to solve problems in real life and to produce useful outcomes. She enjoined the audience to check out World Without Oil, which releases April 30, 2007. Other groups are now looking to use ARGs to support product releases. For instance, Microsoft launched The Vanishing Point, an online global cross-media puzzle game, to celebrate the release of Vista, its new Operating System. More than 100,000 players registered for the game, which placed clues in world landmarks such as San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Singapore's Victoria Theater.

One of the things that makes a Serious Game different from an entertainment game is the budget: a Serious Game will typically have a budget of around $1 million, whereas a PS3 game these days can easily reach a $10 million level. This means that Serious Game producers have to re-use a lot of assets that some other group created, especially middleware such as game engines, the software that supports how characters move around in an environment, how they and the terrain are rendered and interact, etc. There are a number of game engines available and the choice of which is best is always a hot topic at every Serious Games conference.

One of the most popular high-end game engines is Epic's Unreal engine from the Unreal Tournament series of games, which has been used for such Serious Games as America's Army, Tactical Iraqi and Hazmat: Hotzone. A company named Virtual Heroes has significantly extended the Unreal engine into the Unreal3 Advanced Learning Technology system, which is now a complete game development framework, with content creation tools and support infrastructure. Prices start around $40K and can go around 10 times that.

A less costly alternative is SIGMA, from Muzzy Lane, which is especially targeted for the education market. "We decided to build a new platform from the ground up that has integrated assessment, is affordable and is designed for K-16 education from the start," said Dave McCool, company founder and president. Another engine is mosbe from BreakAway Ltd., which is one of the major producers in the Serious Games space, and which has decided to focus on middleware for other game producers. mosbe is a PC-based desktop development studio that has been designed to be easier to use than most of its competitors, so that even small companies can create educational games with it. "BreakAway will become a game platform company, more than a game development business," said Doug Whatley, BreakAway's president. "That's where we see the largest opportunity in the Serious Games space."

BreakAway is one of the largest and most successful producers of educational games. It creates commercial entertainment games as well as Serious Games, believing that a product mix of the two under one roof is beneficial. Its serious products include 24 Blue, a 3rd person action simulation of Navy personnel aboard the chaotic flight deck of an aircraft carrier, trying to keep things under control; A Force More Powerful, a political game created for the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict that teachers players how to organize and carry out non-violent protests; Virtual Training Bank, which challenges auditors to uncover bank theft by following clues along the money trail; Incident Commander, which teaches incident management to public safety officers in situations such as severe storm recovery, chemical spills and bomb attacks; Pulse!!, which teaches medical professionals to practice clinical skills with patients in a virtual hospital; Free Dive!, which leads children who are undergoing painful medical treatments in real life into an engaging underworld environment full of fish and treasure; and Code Orange, which trains teams of medical personnel to respond to catastrophic events.

The field of Serious Games is growing both in number and in scope, and funding is now available from many corporate sources, as well as government and military organizations. This field is one that animators and others interested in getting into the gaming field should seriously consider, since the number of possible applications -- and the opportunity to get started -- appear to be much greater than is the case with high-end entertainment games. Check out the organization's website which has many leads to conferences, specialty organizations, schools and jobs in this field.

Christopher Harz is an executive consultant for new media. He has produced videogames for films such as Spawn, The Fifth Element, Titanic and Lost in Space. As Perceptronics svp of program development, Harz helped build the first massively multiplayer online game worlds, including the $240 million 3-D SIMNET. He worked on C3I, combat robots and war gaming at the RAND Corp., the military think tank.